by Alison Fell
It’s amazing, really, what you can concoct out of a 20 minute chat in the sultry shade of a city afternoon.
On the balcony next door Shapcott père appears in pajama bottoms, his bare arms stringy in the sharp morning light.
‘Morning,’ he mutters, spotting her, and nips smartly back inside. The balconies are separated by a gap of half a metre – too close, it seems, for comfort. Clearly convivial breakfasts – like foreign dogs – aren’t on Mr. Shapcott’s agenda.
What is it with him, she wonders – would it kill him to make a joke or say a pleasant word? It isn’t as if she’s smoking a joint, sunbathing starkers, or doing any other single thing a normal person might find offensive.
To her relief she sees Glenys emerge from the back door of the Captain’s and hurry up the street. When Ingrid hails her from the balcony she stops on the pavement and looks up, flustered and lipstickless, her hair unstyled.
‘It’s Charlie’ she says, ‘She’s had a bit of a turn. It’s this arhythmia she gets, see.’
Ingrid is startled. Charlie is quick and lean and leather-skinned – a mini-Viking, not unlike her own mother in appearance, although it has to be said that Greta Laurie née Henderson had never done justice to her genes. Charlie could be a retired fell-runner; to look at her, you’d think she was indestructible.
‘Is she all right?’
‘Says she is, but we’re running her to the doctor, just in case.’ Glenys’ face is wan, worry deepening her wrinkles and showing up her age. ‘If you ask me it’s just the heat, but you know, better safe than sorry.’
‘Do you need me to come?’ asks Ingrid, ‘ to translate or anything?’
‘No love, you’re fine. Lynda said they speak English at the clinic. Shame about our trip, though.’
Glenys trots away down the cobbled street, backless sandals slapping at her heels. Seized by an urge to get going immediately, Ingrid crushes out her cigarette and picks up her keys. A bus to Heraklion, pick up the Arkhanes one at the port; it’s all perfectly do-able, even if it won’t be the day she designed, the drive she was so looking forward to. A touch of tour-guiding in low-key, reassuring company; the way the Giffords foster her, draw her into the bosom of the family.
On the bus she sinks back in her seat and watches the landscape as if through a mist. Disjointed villages, farm-tracks leading God knows where. A melon-field floats in the heat-haze.
Aimless walking, aimless looking. Already the thought of the day makes her feel leaden and exhausted, as if she were toting around some helpless small animal.
The bus stops in the dusty main square of Arkhanes and settles, sighing, on its suspension. It’s siesta time, and hardly anyone is about; the air is heavy, loud with the drilling of cicadas.
At the periptero she stocks up with water for the hike and stands in the slice of shade under the awning, orienting herself. The printout tells her to take the left fork at the church, then it’s a two and a half kilometre walk round the shoulder of Mount Yuchtas.
On the outskirts she passes polytunnels of tomatoes, a field of sunflowers whose ranked faces gaze up adoringly at Ilios. The road snakes uphill, treeless, through a hinterland of vineyards. After 45 minutes she discovers that it’s also carless. Two and a half kilometres is, of course, pure fiction. Greek signposts are as imaginative as ever.
Mount Yuchtas rears up steeply on her left, drifted with grey scree and furze. On the skyline ahead the road breasts a col, to the right of which is a high beetling outcrop guarded by pines. She sees towers of yellow rock, free-standing and wind-blasted. Behind the trees, scooped caves are violet in shadow. The Caves of the Wind.
A car is approaching from behind – some kind of jeep with body-work sprayed an improbable shade of lilac. A dog’s head pokes though the passenger window, ears flattened back by the draught. She lifts her thumb, but the jeep is already slowing.
‘Anemospilia?’
‘You’re going there?’ says Ingrid, recognising first the dog, and then the driver, who is already leaning over to open the back door.
‘It’s hot, yes?’ the woman says in English, as Ingrid squeezes herself in beside several grain-sacks and a perforated plastic crate which smells rank and sweetish, like boiled hay. Scuffling and mewing sounds come from within.
The St. Bernard plants its paws on the back of the passenger seat and salutes Ingrid with rapturous barks. The woman is studying her intently.
‘Not so many people visit this site. You are an archaeologist?’
Ingrid nods. ‘I’m doing some research.’
The words sound self-important, even a little fraudulent. Alice was dead long before Anemospilia was discovered, and there’s really no credible link between the two. She pats the eager muzzle of the puppy, which has powered itself halfway over the seat-back and is trying to lick her face.
‘What age is he?’
‘Six months only. Soon the baby will be too big for the jeep!’
When the woman smiles over her shoulder long silver earrings flick against her neck, delicate chains on the ends of which double-axes dangle like anchors.
Oh, here we go, thinks Ingrid, who knows her female symbols, but wouldn’t be seen dead wearing them.
Just over the col the road swings left and contours a flattish bluff, on the right of which the land falls away to orchards, vineyards, and, in the distance, 180 degrees of sea. On the left, parched rocky ground slopes uphill, dotted with prickly shrubs. She spots a rusted chain-link fence with a padlocked gate, and a weathered sign in Greek and English which announces that the site is closed.
The jeep pulls into the delta of a short sandy track which leads up to the gate. As Ingrid gets out, the German woman tells her that there’s a gap in the fence higher up. She drapes her bare arm along the open window, her smile conspiratorial. ‘To come alone is better, no? This way, you feel the power.’
‘Ah yes,’ she agrees, shrinking inwardly from all self-deluding sisterhoods. That’s the trouble with prehistory – it’s a blank slate on which anyone can write their own rituals, project their own shadows.
The woman engages the clutch and eases the jeep out on to the road.
‘Enjoy your day!’
The remark falls oddly on Ingrid’s ears, the German accent robbing it of all irony.
It’s cooler up here, thanks to a sturdy little breeze shuting down from the summit of the mountain. She follows the fence and finds the hole at the highest point. From here the site spreads out below her, north-facing, bleak and birdless under a vast sky. The place has an orphaned, unwanted look; it looks as if no one has dug here since the 1979 excavations.
There are the remains of three small rooms, connected on the north side by what must once have been a corridor or porch. The walls are barely knee-high, one course of square-cut blocks surmounting another course of irregular boulders, set in crumbling mortar.
The west room contains not only a stone slab she assumes was the altar, but also, unaccountably, a cold-frame in which nothing grows but rubbish – a broken jam jar, an empty cigarette packet.
Near the north-east corner of the porch-structure she sees a pair of horns of consecration, barely two feet high. She goes over to take a closer look. They’ve been carved from a granitic rock, diorite, perhaps; judging by the hairline cement seam, they’ve been carefully restored. She crouches among chamomile flowers to run a hand over them. The surface is warm and retains a pleasing roughness; the stone has been ground, she thinks, rather than polished.
On a flinty bank above the site she sits down to eat her spinach pie. Her boots are rimmed with yellow dust. Burrs have stuck fast to the laces, and blood from a scratch on her shin has trickled down into her sock. When she puts her finger to the runnel and sucks she remembers Marinatos’ monograph on sacrificial ritual. Before the blood to be used for the libation was poured over the horns of consecration, it was mixed with vinegar or red wine to prevent coagulation. Nanno Marinatos, that is, daughter of the famous Spiridon: you could always trust
a woman to get right down to the recipe.
The water in her bottle has reached blood heat. She rinses out her mouth and wipes oily pastry-flakes from her fingers.
Bees cruise by, banking over clumps of thyme and heather. She sits in her heavy body, hearing her heart beat in the silence. Her very own perishability, pulsing away the seconds.
Somewhere below the lip of the site, two farm dogs strike up a conversation across fields. A moment later another, fainter, bark joins in, and then the message zigzags on down the hill like semaphore, diminishing plaintively into the distance.
The stones say nothing and everything: stories she can feel but can’t hear, silent, insistent voices pressing against her skin.
The image that comes into her mind dates from the mid-nineties. The Turner Prize: a whole room filled with Anthony Gormley’s terracotta midgets, massed in thousands on the floor. No more than tiny balls of clay with pinprick mouths and eyes raised to the heavens in some wordless plea for protection. They seemed to be drawing a collective breath, sighing in unison. Needing everything, like children do, and because of this, everything was what they deserved.
Looking at them, she could almost imagine how queens or gods might feel, when pressured by that enormous deficit – how you’d swell up like a cistern with spiritual credit, how you’d savour the duty to disburse.
My little Minoans. A small people, but perfectly formed.
Even if Alice’s Linear B sign-groups and grids seem mechanical, inimical, Ingrid can understand why she focussed so stringently on structures, and steered well clear of anything as unscientific as empathy. It was her way of trying – and try she did, harder than anyone, perhaps – to give her Minoans a voice.
But surely, thinks Ingrid, hugging her knees and feeling tears mount up in her suddenly like a wave, surely they deserve more than that.
The milk. The honey. The warm enfolding arms.
30
If Alice Kober could be sisterly – even, on occasion, mildly flirtatious – with John Franklin Daniel, and flattering, in a daughterly way, to Johannes Sundwall – after seeing a snapshot of him at 70, she wrote coyly ‘Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake of about 20 years in your age?’ – she appears to have been frosty, at best, with Michael Ventris.
Born in 1922, and educated at boarding schools in England and Switzerland, Michael Ventris had looked on Linear B as ‘a hobby’ since an encounter with Sir Arthur Evans at a Stowe School outing to Burlington House in 1936. Although at 14 he already showed precocious brilliance as a linguist, he was to follow architecture as a career and, unlike Kober, never undertook any formal study of Classics or linguistics. It was, rather, the sheer puzzle of the undeciphered script that seized his interest, and continued to fascinate him until his death in 1956.
As the first bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940, Ventris, with youthful cheek, had sent an article to the American Journal of Archaeology in which he proposed that the Minoan language was closely related to Etruscan. ‘Introducing the Minoan Language’ duly appeared in the last issue of AJA for that year, the author having omitted to mention in his covering letter that he was only 18.
Ever since Sir Arthur Evans’ death in 1941, Ventris had been in touch with Sir John Myres, and after his demobilisation in the summer of 1946 – he had served as a navigator in the RAF, and then worked with the Control Commission in West Germany – Myres invited him to Oxford to see the Knossos tablets for himself. He also solicited Ventris’ help with the work on Scripta Minoa II.
Anxious to resume his studies at the Architectural Association, which had been interrupted by the war, Ventris turned Sir John down. One wonders, however, how differently things might have turned out for Alice Kober if he had not. Only a few weeks later Myres received Kober’s first enthusiastic letter from Brooklyn, and jumped at the chance of having her skills at his disposal. It is unclear whether Kober knew at the time that she had not been, as it were, the first candidate for the job, but it is tempting to speculate whether this might have been one of the factors which coloured her attitude to the young decipherer.
By the beginning of 1948 Myres and Ventris were once again corresponding regularly about Linear B, and in March Myres sent a sample page of Ventris’ drawings of the inscriptions to Kober in Brooklyn. She responded with praise – ‘Mr. Ventris would have no trouble getting a job as scribe to King Minos. This is beautiful writing.’ – but also with criticism. The criticism took the form of 5 closely-typed pages which laid out a protocol in 8 points, detailing which rules and principles were to be observed in transcribing the Linear B texts.
Kober sent Ventris a copy of The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory, which was about to appear in the American Journal of Archaeology, and mentions in passing to Daniel that ‘Ventris has been added to my list of correspondents.’
His first letters to her – addressed to ‘Miss Kober’ – are boyishly expansive and fairly burst with enthusiasm. Quite quickly, however, a suppliant note creeps in – ‘I hope I made amends for my Inthos mistake by anticipating its proper genderlessness in my last letter’ – he writes, and one begins to get the impression of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.
There is no doubt that Kober criticised Ventris for his methodology. She knew that Myres still wanted him on board, and that in all probability the two of them would be obliged to collaborate that summer in Oxford; one certainly gets the impression that she wanted to whip Ventris into shape beforehand.
By the end of May Ventris’ tone is that of someone attempting to propitiate while still sticking to his guns.
‘I hope my experiments with phonetic values don’t seem completely arbitrary to you – I feel some of us must try out some hypothesis of linguistic relationship in order to clarify the possibilities.’
One can’t help noticing that by this time Ventris has stopped addressing Kober as ‘Miss’ – had she pulled rank, perhaps? – adopting instead the more formal (and correct) Dr.
Earlier that month Kober had received bad news from John Franklin Daniel. Despite all Daniel’s efforts on her behalf, the Indo-European post had gone to Hoenigswald.
‘I am terribly disappointed,’ he wrote, ‘I was dreaming wonderful dreams of the terrific set-up we would have here with you and the Minoan collection.’
Kober replied stoically, ‘Well, it was fun while it lasted. I can’t say your news was unexpected, because I am a pessimist from ‘way back, and always expect the worst – hoping to be pleasantly surprised.’
Daniel hastily concocted a scaled-down proposal for the ‘Centre for Minoan Linguistic Research’ and fired it off to the Director of the Museum, Dr. Froelich Rainey. Internal memos show that the University authorities looked favourably on the modest budgeting, which was to involve little more than the cost of refurbishing the small space next to Daniel’s office. The only other action required, they noted, was the appointment of Dr. Alice Kober as Research Assistant, without pay. Far from being comfortably installed in the lucrative Indo-European chair, Kober was now to work for nothing, in what amounted to a broom-cupboard.
The prospect, however, seems not to have daunted her in the least. In any case, the Minoan project would be on hold for the summer, as she had promised to go to Oxford in July, and Daniel, meanwhile, was to set off for Greece on September 10th, the day Alice was scheduled to sail back from England.
In Oxford, Myres was once again mired in publication difficulties with the Clarendon Press, and fretted that he might even have to make ‘ a very unsatisfactory facsimile publication of the earlier scripts and Cypro-Minoan.’
Alerted by Kober, Daniel immediately suggested that the AJA should publish the material, either in instalments, or as a monograph ‘if funds can be raised, which is uncertain: we haven’t yet got any more for your paper.’ [Kober’s Element -Inth monograph, which still awaited publication.]
As always the conduit between England and the U.S., Kober agreed to ‘put in a plug’ with Myres, adding altruistically, ‘And
for goodness sake, forget my monograph, if that money will do any good for this project.’
And here, with a brief discussion of final proof-corrections for her ‘Minoan Scripts’ article, and a breezy exchange of good wishes for their respective summers, the correspondence between Alice Kober and John Franklin Daniel ends. By a cruel twist of fate, the two colleagues were never to see each other again. If it can be said that the covetous gods had singled out both scholars for special treatment, it was the buoyant, energetic Daniel whom they clearly loved the best.
31
On his way to HQ Yiannis had taken a detour via Dedalou and stopped off at Eleftheria. The doorway was mud-brown, flanked on one side by sacks of organic compost, and on the other by a blackboard which advertised the healing benefits of rock crystals.
Inside he’d found a youth behind the counter, weighing soya beans into brown paper bags. His skin was pale as mother-of-pearl, his body skinny and tapering. Perched on the back of his head was a brown Fedora hat that would have been looked a whole lot better on Yves Montand
‘So you’re saying you’re never open on Sundays?’
‘I didn’t say never. I said not that I know of.’ The accent was more obtuse than Australian – New Zealand, Yiannis reckoned – and the face was petulant. ‘We do need a day off sometimes, you know?’
